Slack’s hidden origins, cybersecurity, fintech, plus Africa’s startup growth

The Slack Origin Story

Slack is one of the most iconic enterprise companies to come out of Silicon Valley. Part of the reason is the mythos surrounding the startup’s founding as a games company and later pivot into workplace communication. But what’s the story behind the story of the high-flying company? Who supported the company every step of the way?

Our venture capital reporter Kate Clark has the history and background on Slack, soon to be trading as WORK on the NYSE.

“We realized, wow, this is hugely a productive way of working and I think all of us agreed we wouldn’t work without a system like this again and maybe other people would like it,” Butterfield said in a recent video released by Slack ahead of its June 20 direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

So the team reimagined their future and looked to their investors for support.

Accel, sources tell TechCrunch, remained committed. Andreessen Horowitz, however, had a more complicated response. According to sources familiar with the matter, a16z was highly skeptical of Butterfield and whether he could succeed in the enterprise space. When Tiny Speck went out to raise its first round of capital as an enterprise software upstart in what would technically be its Series C, a16z hesitated.

A source close to Slack told TechCrunch that a16z put the company “through the ringer,” telling Butterfield that enterprise “wasn’t in his DNA.” A16z denies these accounts citing their close relationship with Butterfield and the business in 2019. Admittedly, it’s unclear how much capital a16z may or may not have funneled to Slack at the Series C but given it currently owns nearly 10 percent less of Slack than Accel, a fellow early investor, its likely to have cut back its capital commitments around the time of Tiny Speck’s pivot.

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Why Dragos’ CEO puts a premium on people not profits

TechCrunch security editor Zack Whittaker is starting a series of capsule interviews with cybersecurity startup CEOs about building startups in the space, the challenges of working in security, and hiring talent and building culture in a competitive marketplace. His first interview is with industrial cybersecurity startup Dragos CEO Robert Lee.

Lee said he doesn’t want to change its culture dynamics by growing too fast, micromanaging, or burdening his staff with strict expense policies. “If you’re stuck laid over at night, but you see there’s one seat left on a redeye and it’s a first class seat that’s going to cost six times more but it gets you home — go for it,” he said.

But he doesn’t compromise on his “don’t be an asshole” rule. “Say something sexist in a Slack channel? Yeah, you’re fired,” he said.

Security startup Bugcrowd on crowdsourcing bug bounties: ‘Cybersecurity is a people problem’

We also published Zack’s second interview in his series, this one with crowdsourced cybersecurity platform Bugcrowd CEO Casey Ellis.

“Part of the role of a founding team is to be, pretty much irrationally pissed off about a problem they think they can solve,” he said. “And that ‘irrational’ part of that is something you should actually codify and make sure it’s clear to everyone, and making sure that everyone you work with understands it,” he said.

Anthemis: Amy Nicklaus & Sean Park – “Keeping it weird with Anthemis.”

Anthemis is a smorgasbord venture firm, media company, and advisory shop that focuses on investing in and building up financial services startups. Our fintech columnist Gregg Schoenberg and our Extra Crunch research consultant Arman Tabatabai interviewed the firm’s co-founder and current CEO Amy Nicklaus and co-founder and chairman Sean Park about the direction of the fund, where fintech is headed, and the challenges of discrimination in the finance space.

Gregg: With the two of you now at the helm, how does Anthemis present itself today?

Sean: I’ll step back and say that when Amy and I were working at big financial institutions in the noughties, we saw that the industry was going to change and that existing business models were running into their natural diminishing returns.

We tried to bring some new ideas to the organizations we were working in, but we each had epiphany moments when we realized that big organizations weren’t built to do disruptive transformation — for bad reasons, but also good reasons, too.

…

Gregg: When you decided to do deals in resiliency, did any of your LPs say, ‘WTF? This isn’t Fintech, and it’s not what we thought we were getting when we backed you’?

Amy: No, and quite frankly, if they did, they wouldn’t be our LPs. And look, we’re not going to be for everybody, and that’s okay.

Diving deep into Africa’s blossoming tech scene

Finally as we close out this shortened holiday week, TechCrunch’s Africa tech expert Jake Bright put together a special report on the current state of Africa’s startup ecosystem. There is a lot happening on the continent if you aren’t paying attention, and a lot of it intersects today with Silicon Valley.

A more widely distributed number of African startups is emerging across all development stages, from seed to early and later-stage. Some later stage survivors include Series E VOD venture iROKOtv, headed up by Nigerian entrepreneur Jason Njoku. Kenyan-based Cellulant — a startup with a niche for providing payments infrastructure to banks— raised a $47 million Series C round in 2018. Nigerian payments company Paga, launched by Tayo Oviosu in 2010, raised a $10 million Series B in September 2018.

Oviosu also represents one facet of the local, global, and repat mix of Africa’s startup founders. A number of ventures that gained traction in the earlier days of the continent’s tech boom, 2007 to 2014, were launched by repatriate founders—Africans who had worked and studied abroad (often in the U.S. and Silicon Valley) then returned to the continent to start tech companies.

ICYMI

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.